Andrew Hickey
speaker
2,253 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs · Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa · 21 Jul 2026
podcast
Mike Kerb was in talks to merge MGM Records with his own label, and MGM Verve would soon become Kerb Records.
Curb was himself a musician, but his group, the Mike Curb Congregation, are best known for singing backing vocals on Sammy Davis Jr's version of The Candyman and performing It's a Small World for the Disney attraction.
Curb would go on to sign the Christian rock artist Larry Norman, drop any artists from Curb records that he thought were promoting drugs, and become a Republican politician.
As of this writing, he is the last Republican to be elected Lieutenant Governor of California.
While that was going on, Zappa was working in the background on the MGM version of Lumpy Gravy.
That would become a very different beast to the version that had been semi-released on Capitol.
While the Capitol version had been purely orchestral, Zappa's new conception of the album changed it dramatically.
The orchestral music itself was all the same as it had been.
But instead of being several distinct orchestral tracks, the album was split into two side-long movements, and the orchestral music was interspersed with dialogue, with various people who were around at the time, members of the Mothers, Gail Zapper, studio personnel and others, all putting their heads inside a grand piano so their voices would make the strings resonate, and improvising dialogue about concepts that Zapper told them to talk about.
Zapper then edited this, the orchestral music, and various bits of older music,
a 1963 demo of the song that became Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance on We're All In It For The Money, and a bit of a surf track that he recorded around the same time, which he also included on We're All In It For The Money, into a collage.
Lumpy Gravy was still released as a Frank Zappa album, while We're Only In It For The Money was by the Mothers of Invention, but the two albums were promoted as connected.
On the cover of We're Only In It For The Money, there's a speech bubble by Zappa's photo saying, is this phase one of Lumpy Gravy?
While the cover of Lumpy Gravy has him asking, is this phase two of We're Only In It For The Money?
And the one-two punch of those albums established Zappa as a major creative force in rock music.
Incidentally, Zappa's credit on the MGM version of Lumpy Gravy originally read Francis Vincent Zappa.
Zappa believed that was his birth name, because his dad had been Francis Zappa.
He says in his autobiography, Up until the time I had to get a passport for the first European tour, I thought my name was Francis, a name I had always hated.
In order to get the passport, I had to present my birth certificate, a mysterious document I had never seen before.
My mother mailed it to me from California, and on it, much to my delight, was a name other than Francis.
Showing 1241–1260 of 2,253 · page 63 of 113
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